For someone who is such a lover of horror films and enjoys watching episodes of 48 Hours about real life murder mysteries almost on a loop and who literally has every single book written about the Manson Family and their blood-drenched killing spree back in the summer of ’69 spread across my bookshelves, I happen to have a very low tolerance for the things that really freak me out, the stuff that has managed to slip into my subconscious and has remained there, taunting me almost, for decades.

The things that terrify me?  They’re maybe not of the typical variety.  I can’t say that I enjoy clowns, but I’m not petrified of them either.  I never lie in my bed in the quiet shadows of the night and mull over the possibility that either Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees is coming to get me – and I have never been at all frightened by Chucky, because, well, he’s a doll and a redheaded doll at that, and butcher-knife-wielding or not, he is like three feet tall and he always has on the kind of ugly striped shirt worn by an unfortunate tween with bad acne.  Just last week, I finally read the book The Shining about a zillion years after it was published, and I told my mother that I was in the middle of it and I could hear her as she took a deep breath over the phone and she sounded genuinely horrified and very serious when she tried to caution me not to read it if I was alone in my house and I thought that was very cute of her, but it was also entirely unnecessary.